The use of touch-sensitive surfaces as input devices for computers and other electronic computing devices has increased significantly in recent years. Exemplary touch-sensitive surfaces include touch pads and touch screen displays. Such surfaces are widely used to manipulate user interface objects on a display.
For electronic devices with touch-sensitive surfaces, existing methods for interpreting user gestures are inefficient. In particular, electronic devices may not accurately interpret gesture inputs in accordance with a user's intent. For example, when displaying a page in an electronic document, such devices may turn to a next page in the electronic document in response to the user's gesture, when the user actually wanted to highlight a portion of the displayed page. Thus, the user has to go back to the correct page and then retry the gesture input to highlight the portion of the correct page. This is tedious and creates a significant cognitive burden on the user. In addition, such undo-and-retry actions waste time and energy. This latter consideration is particularly important in battery-operated devices.